Detavernier, who is just 20 years old, took the subway maps of three cities with complex urban public transit systems–Paris, London, and Moscow–and chopped out chunks of them to form her own alphabet. Or, rather, alphabets: She constructed not one alphabet poster but two. The first is our own Latin (constructed of the Paris and London maps), and the second is the Cyrillic alphabet (constructed of the Moscow map). Detavernier tells us it was a school project (she’s in her third year in architecture school in Lille, France).

These aren’t natural chunks of the subway system, of course–no subway line is conveniently shaped into the letter “R” or what have you. But these sections of the subway include multiple lines so you can see them from a different perspective. She says none of the “letters” were manipulated: they all naturally intersect like that.